Blog that discusses Cloud Computing and it's place in Federal, State and Local Governments. Focuses on US Federal Government

Thursday Oct 06, 2011

A great opportunity for those of us living in the D.C Metro area that didn't have a chance to visit Oracle Openworld in San Francisco to hear about all the product launches that were announced. Oracle Fedral Forum in Washington D.C is on October 18th,2011 and will be at the Renaissance Marriott in downtown. It is free to attend and all you need to do is to register by following the link.
Cloud has it's own track and has 3 very interesting sessions.
The first Session "The Foundations of the Application Cloud in a Box - Exalogic" is being delivered by Mohamed Afshar, VP Oracle's Middleware product management. This session will focus on the benefits of a pre-engineered private cloud solution.
The second session should be very interesting - given Oracle's announcement of it's public cloud in Openworld. It is jointly delivered by Mike Hichwa, who oversees Oracle's Database Cloud offering and Ajay Patel, who oversees Oracle's Java Cloud offering.
The final session in cloud is about " Building Cloud Right" and is jointly delivered by Sushil Kumar, who manages Product Management for Oracle Enterprise Manager and Sergio Leunissen from our OVM PM team.
There will be other sessions that will highlight Oracle Unbreakable Data Appliance , Exalytics and Oracle Big Data Appliance.

Wednesday Oct 05, 2011

Oracle announced Oracle Public Cloud today - offering Database Cloud, Java Cloud, HCM Cloud, Social Network and CRM Cloud.
Key to note is that Oracle's Public Cloud is powered by the same technology that can be used to power an enterprise's private cloud - namely Exadata and Exalogic. Another important thing to note is that the technology portability that an Oracle customer would get moving between public and private cloud. More to come..

Thursday Sep 01, 2011

For those that are paying attention on the happenings in the hypervisor world - Oracle launched OVM 3.0, it's next generation hypervisor last week. One of the key messages as it relates to hypervisor that we have been highlighting is that virtualization needs to be purposeful. For virtualization to be purposeful, it needs to really understand the workloads that run on top of it. If the hypervisor acts as just a black box, then from a performance perspective, you just lost a few ticks of your CPU without getting much for it. On the other hand,if the hypervisor is workload aware or "application aware" then you get the following benefits
- Better performance as the application is better tuned for the hypervisor
- Better reliability during failovers/live migrations etc - less chance of application data loss/application config losses.
- Rapid buildout of your virtual environment while keeping less gold images ( vm image management is a pain for those that have done it) as you use templates to build things out - keeping things modular in nature.
- Allows change in configurations without having to completely rebuild and store new gold images and takes away worries about versioning etc.
- Allows the user flexibility to manage patching activity much faster -rather than an all or nothing approach..
Interestingly enough at Loudcloud and later at Opsware, we had the exact same viewpoint of how application infrastructure needs to be built out in a physical environment (at that time). Our approach in Opsware's Server Automation platform was template driven against BMC's Bladelogic vision of managing golden images for each and every minor variation.
I will try to add more later on the compare/contrast of template driven buildout of infrastructure against a image/snapshot driven buildout.

Thursday Aug 18, 2011

Oracle is doing an Oracle VM launch event webcast on August 23rd. It's a great opportunity to hear from Oracle as to where we are taking our hypervisor virtualization story.
Follow the link to register and listen in to the webcast - http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/h2fy11/77963-wwmk11010781mpp002c004-oem-454683.html

Sunday Jun 12, 2011

I have a busy two weeks starting this week. I will be in Salem, Oregon presenting on the topic "Bringing Clouds Down to Earth" on june 13th. Then, I head out to Jefferson City, MO to present in Missouri's Stage Digital Summit on Wednesday. I get to do the same activity in Olympia, Seattle on June 21st. Should be an interesting one to hear how Western states are adopting Cloud computing.